Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

They walked more than an hour with hands linked at the edge of the curb until awkward footing gave him the opportunity to withdraw his hand. He watched her as she looked up at the lightening sky, at the shadowed trucks passing on the highway, smiling as if she were out on some great adventure, some sort of safari, and such naiveté repelled him. Clearly, she hadn’t the slightest grasp of the true dangers of the world. She was a murder waiting to happen.

“You’re not married, are you?”

He looked at her in surprise. “No, of course not, why would you think…”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. I just had this sudden thought, ‘Maybe he’s married.’ I don’t know why.”

Actually, the fact that she thought to ask the question raised her in his estimation. He briefly considered answering ‘yes,’ curious what her response might be. “No. My wife left me years ago.”

“Oh! I’m so sorry.”

“No, no. Like I said, it’s been years.”

She said nothing for awhile, concentrating on her feet. A shiny, fifties-style diner gleamed from the lot ahead, but after that there was nothing but weeds and ill-kept road for a mile or more. Such stupidity, he thought. Women were killed in places like this. Bodies were dumped. So much unnecessary waste in the world. So much lost potential.

“I was married for years,” she said quietly. “Happily, but it was almost all I ever knew. Each day must be like an adventure for you. You must feel like you could do anything.”

She was giving him every opportunity to impress her with his lies. So this was the way it happened. This was the way nice, lonely women got themselves killed. “Right now,” he said, “I suppose I could do anything. Just to see how it would feel.”

“Oh, I can tell you have a great deal of potential. I could see that from the beginning.”

“Just to feel anything, really. People go to such lengths sometimes. Just to feel something.”

“That’s so true. And all the time it’s right there in front of you.”

“The opportunity is there. No one would know.”

“Absolutely. No one knows how any of us feels.” She grabbed his forearm and looked up into his eyes. “But I believe you can tell a lot about a person, if you just look at them, really look at them.”

He returned her gaze, trying to let something come through that would beam down from his eyes and brand her. Not a warning exactly. Perhaps just a glimpse at what the human heart is truly capable of. But she hadn’t a clue. “I can tell that you’re a very sensitive person,” she said, misinterpreting everything. “Let me buy you breakfast.”

They sat together in the diner for over an hour eating their slow breakfast. Everything was too bright: the chrome trim around the walls and tables, the ghastly intensity of the fluorescents, the early sap of the day rising out of unpromising concrete to fill the air with brilliance. Her face. Older than his, he thought, much older than she’d seemed in the dark. But he was so bad with ages, he reminded himself. It suddenly occurred to him that he might look old. That’s why she had taken such a risk, gone walking out into the darkness with a less-than-perfect stranger. Because he’d looked too old to do her any harm.

Make-up had caked near her eyes and at the left corner of her mouth. He could see now that she used a little too much lipstick. And something was wrong with her eye shadow: she looked more bruised than seductive. No doubt during the walk here she had perspired, and the make-up had run a bit. Or maybe it had happened during dancing. Some women perspired more, but he hadn’t been aware of her dancing with anyone other than him. It had been as if she’d been waiting. Waiting for someone like him. Her murderer.

Not that he had ever murdered anyone. He’d never even punched anyone. His previous murders had been strictly academic. He was like one of those fellows who played entire games of chess in his head, and never went near a board and pieces. She might have been his first.

But the woman didn’t know how to put make-up on anymore. That was it, wasn’t it? She’d come to Jack’s like this, and he hadn’t known because of the dim lighting.

She smiled up at him. A small bit of congealed egg clung to one powder- and grease-smeared cheek. He picked up a napkin and dipped one corner into his water glass. “Here,” he said. “Here. You’ve got something on you. Let me.” And he reached over, and she sat still as a daughter while he smoothed the place by her mouth, and blended her eye shadow, and gently removed the food clinging to her cheek. “Like a picture,” he said. “Like a pretty picture.”

She held his hand. “You’re a good man,” she said, knowing absolutely nothing about him, and it hurt him so to hear, and he could feel the anger coming as if from a great distance.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I have to go the bathroom.” He got up and walked to the back of the restaurant, and the hall that led to the restrooms, and he walked past the restrooms and out the back door, away from his first real victim.

The morning was hot and dusty and he was still dressed in his best outfit, the black shirt and slacks and the thin silver tie. He walked through the weed and dirt lot behind the diner and wedged himself through a break in the fence.

He walked down several blocks of bad pavement, poor houses and trashy yards. Ahead of him was a church, and a number of people in nice dresses and suits stood beneath an awning in the graveyard. He came as close to the funeral as he could. No one noticed him. Until a woman’s voice, slightly to his left and behind. “I see I’m not the only one who’s late,” she whispered, and drew closer, stepping beside him so they looked like a couple who had traveled here together to pay their respects.

“I didn’t know her that well,” she said softly. “But I hear she was just a wonderful woman.”

He tried to look beyond the perfect make-up job, and could not. “I didn’t know her at all,” he said.

“I know exactly what you mean,” she replied, completely misunderstanding him, not knowing anything that would help her through the next few hours.

“You look like you deserve a hug,” Anita said, again, as she had said every time Jefferson ran into her. Only this time they were alone, late at night in the park across the street from the movie theater. There wasn’t the crowd of people around she had always seemed to require. The crowd whose individual members looked so fondly at Anita’s heartfelt expressions of her humanity. “I think you do! I think you do deserve a hug today!”

When there was a crowd Jefferson could avoid her; he could fade into that large and unmanageable, unhuggable crowd.

But here there were no witnesses. The last show at the theatre had been an hour ago; Jefferson had hung around in the park because he liked the dark and the relative emptiness of late night. He had not expected to see Anita here—he supposed she was returning from some late night hugging session.

She looked at him intently and seemed disturbed by what she saw. But then she had never seen Jefferson late at night, with no one else around. She started to pass him, confirming finally for him that these offers of hugs had become merely formal, required greeting for her, and had no conviction behind them at all.

Tonight Jefferson would have none of that. It was dark and there was no one else around, and he had not touched, much less held, anyone in months. His skin felt dead, a brittle carapace for his nerves. His bones ached as if riddled with holes. He had a need to touch someone else’s life, and if not their life at least their desperation, which for him was much the same thing.